The world according to Jim:
• This is another of those peculiarities that make Southern California … well, different. And not necessarily in a bad way, unless you’re a marketing executive for the Rams or Chargers.
Elsewhere, NFL camps are about to start, or already gearing up in a couple of places (including here). In many of those cities, the populace can’t get enough training camp news. For much of the country, there’s football and then there’s everything else when it comes to sports interest.
(Especially if the baseball team isn’t good. Think they’re not hungry for the NFL in Denver, say, or Pittsburgh, or D.C. or the south side of Chicago? Then again, the Bears could be just as miserable as the White Sox.) …
• Here? We’ve got the Dodgers and Angels. We’ve got the Lakers’ and Clippers’ summertime acquisitions (hello, Bradley Beal!) and lots of LeBron James rumors. We’ve got so much going on that it’s easy to overlook the fact the Chargers opened practice Thursday – and that they lost a player before the whole process even began. Mike Williams, reacquired in the offseason but placed on the Physically Unable to Perform list before camp began, has instead retired, which means one less familiar target for Justin Herbert. …
• The point? We went 21 seasons without NFL football at all. We can wait a few more weeks for the Chargers and the Rams, who open their camp this coming Thursday at Loyola Marymount, to play games that mean something. Training camp news may be the lead story in some cities, but not here. …
• Still, considering those 21 barren seasons, it is nice to have the NFL here and available when we need it. …
• That said, I am exercising the veteran’s prerogative and skipping preseason games. If it was good enough for LaDainian Tomlinson when the Chargers were in San Diego – and Michael Turner was the featured back in August, saving LT for the real thing – it’s good enough for me. …
• Headline: “Viewership of All-Star Game down by 3.5%.” Reaction: “Please don’t let Major League Baseball use that as an excuse to again make the players wear those awful generic clown suits.”
Didn’t it just feel right to have the All-Stars wearing their regular uniforms Tuesday night? …
• The total viewership – yes, down a tick from the 2024 game in Arlington, Texas – still averaged 7,185,000 viewers, according to Nielsen. That was Fox’s best viewership performance since the Super Bowl and its best Tuesday night viewership since last year’s World Series Game 4.
Maybe Fox should try Tuesday Night Baseball every week. Got to be better than their regular prime-time programming, right? …
• This week’s quiz: The 2022 All-Star Game took place at Dodger Stadium. What happened on the very first pitch of the game? Answer below. …
• Rob Manfred is already positioning the sport for its next set of media rights contracts, and the view from here – and elsewhere – is that the sport and ESPN are trying to save face and find a way to keep baseball on the network beyond this year. (The problem of getting baseball more mentions on ESPN’s morning talk shows, which was part of Manfred’s original disenchantment with the network? Different, thornier question.) …
• What the commissioner shouldn’t do in these and future rights contracts? Keep offering exclusivity to streaming services. How many of you out there – and yes, I’m addressing this to a specific demographic – wanted to watch Dodgers-Giants last Sunday but gave up because it was on Roku and not on the regular outlet? …
• You want to put games on Roku, Apple TV+, Peacock, ESPN’s upcoming direct-to-consumer stream or any other streaming platforms? Fine. Have at it. It serves those people who have cut the cord and provides national exposure. But making them exclusive to the streamer and unavailable to local affiliates shuts out those (mostly in the older demographic) who really want to watch but can’t or won’t subscribe to those platforms, often because of cost. …
• An example of why exclusivity is counterproductive: Major League Soccer is in the third season putting nearly its entire inventory of matches exclusively on the Apple TV+ Season Pass platform, for which even Apple TV+ subscribers have to pay extra. Messi or no Messi, that strategy hasn’t driven viewership to Season Pass as much as it has turned off a good number of potential fans. Plus, bars and restaurants that might show those games instead tune their TVs to other sports events. …
• MLS and Apple have a 10-year, $2.5 billion deal that began in 2023. You know how that equates with 30 franchises this year, including the expansion team in San Diego? Divide $250 million by 30 with your trusty calculator and you get $8.333 million per team, though production costs are said to be deducted. There’s also a profit-sharing clause over and above a certain number of subscriptions sold, but the league hadn’t come close to that number in the first two years and probably won’t this year, either.
With business acumen like that, no wonder the league’s salary cap is so strict. …
• I’ve written it here before: You build your brand, create a loyal fanbase and eventually become profitable by luring eyeballs to your sport. Selling exclusivity in exchange for the quick cash does just the opposite.
I would love a business professor, or someone with a TV sports background, to weigh in on this. Am I correct in thinking a team currently aligned with a regional sports network would have a better chance at success – or at least the potential for more eyeballs – by putting all or most of its games on free TV instead, as the Ducks began doing last season? …
• Of course, it helps if you win. The second year of the Ducks’ agreement with Channel 13 and the Victory+ free streaming platform, with Joel Quenneville behind the bench and a roster moving past the rebuilding stage, may be a truer test than the first. …
• Quiz answer: Clayton Kershaw made the first All-Star start of his career on his home mound, and Shohei Ohtani, then with the Angels, was the leadoff hitter for the American League. Before the first pitch, both were interviewed for the Fox telecast and the stadium PA system. Kershaw told Ken Rosenthal, “I’m gonna throw it as hard as I can, it’ll be 91, and we’ll see what happens.” Ohtani, in English, told Tom Verducci: “First pitch, full swing.”
Ohtani whacked a single to center on that first pitch. Then Kershaw picked him off, and joked afterward: “He didn’t hit it over the fence, so it was a win and we can move on.” …
• Footnote: Ohtani received loud cheers when he was introduced at that All-Star Game. You don’t suppose Dodgers fans were already doing some recruiting, do you? …
• Here’s why it’s not wise to trust AI: Just for the fun of it, I typed “MLS Apple TV contract how much per team” into Google, and its Gemini AI generator spit this out: “The Major League Soccer (MLS) and Apple partnership is a 10-year deal worth $2.5 billion, meaning each team receives approximately $25 million per year. This is a significant increase from previous media deals, where teams received a much smaller amount.”
No, Gemini. It’s not a 10-team league.
jalexander@scng.com